Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  Patience shakes her head no. "Not a prayer."

  "Well then, you'll just have to go with him," Anna says. "Personally, I'd love to visit half the places he goes to."

  "We'll see. I think Reedy would like having me with him. But ..."

  "But ..."

  "But I don't have any great desire to see a lot of dead cormorants. You know I can't bear to see a sick animal."

  Anna smooths a wrinkle in her slacks. I'm not sure when my mother-in-law stopped wearing skirts to church and started to wear pants, but I believe it was when she decided she was old.

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  She doesn't, at least in my eyes, look oldcertainly not old like the Scutters. But Laura and I both have noticed that in the last four or five years she has become less fastidious about her clothing, her hair, her skin.

  I close the newspaper's Sunday magazine, and turn to my sister-in-law. "Is Reedy around this afternoon? I didn't see him in church this morning."

  "Yup, he's around. He has a meeting up at his place with some of the people who are helping out at tomorrow's rally. Of course you'll be there, right Scottie?"

  I grimace. "Gee, Patience, I just have a terrible feeling that my calendar's all booked tomorrow afternoon."

  "But you wish you could be there ..."

  "I think I'll watch from a distance, thank you very much."

  Over my shoulder I hear the sound of little-girl giggles, as wood hits wood and someone's croquet ball winds up in the middle of the pumpkin patch.

  Anna waves at her granddaughter, and then cleans the frames of her tortoiseshell eyeglasses. "They all have so much energy, don't they?" she says.

  "Sometimes they have too much energy," Laura tells her.

  "What time do you think Reedy's meeting will be over?" I ask Patience. "By dinner?"

  "Oh, I sure hope so. We're having dinner together tonight, and I don't really feel like talking about your stupid ski resort all night long."

  "Think Reedy would mind if I stopped by?"

  "Why, Scottie," Patience says, her voice a mask of mock sincerity, "I don't think there is anything that Reedy McClure and I would like more than the pleasure of your company."

  "I don't expect you to call off the rally," I hear myself saying, as if I were listening to my voice play back on a tape recorder. It sounds strained, frustrated, more than a little bit irritated. "I understand that's impossible."

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  ''Darn right," Reedy says.

  From some other room in the McClure homestead the phone rings. I pause, waiting for Reedy or Patience to leave me to answer it, but the two of them remain with me in Reedy's den. Patience looks up once from her magazine, but neither she nor Reedy moves.

  "Do you want to get that?" I ask both of them.

  "No, the answering machine is on," Reedy says.

  "Are you expecting Laura to call?" Patience asks me.

  "No."

  Abruptly the machine comes on, interrupting the fourth ring.

  "So what do you want?" Reedy continues.

  "Well, for starters, I want you to keep the melodrama down to a minimum."

  He spreads his arms, palms up. "Consider it done."

  "I mean it. I think that poster of yours is a little overwrought. I think those ads you have on the radio station are downright nuts."

  "I think you and I have a different definition of melodrama. Personally, I don't think there's anything melodramatic on that poster or in our ads."

  Reflexively I roll my eyes. "No one's destroying a forest. No one's destroying a wildlife habitat."

  "That's debatable."

  "And the name of your groupthat's just plain inflammatory."

  "It's an acronym, that's all. A grass roots group needs an acronym."

  "Not with the word rape in it."

  Patience turns to Reedy and shakes her head, agreeing with me for one of the only times in her entire life. If I kept a diary, this would be a seminal entry. "He's right, you know. You shouldn't have used the word 'rape.'"

  "Isn't that what they're doing?" he says to her. "Raping the

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  entire side of a mountain? Raping what's left of the Chittenden River?"

  "That's exactly what I mean!" I tell Reedy. "Listen to yourself. 'What's left of the Chittenden River.' You make it sound like the Chittenden's a sick river, and the resort's expansion project is going to kill it."

  "It would kill it! Three weeks ago the river was twenty percent below normal. By Friday it had fallen to about twenty-five percent."

  "That has nothing to do with Powder Peak."

  "Of course it doesn't. All I'm saying is that this drought proves the river can't support snowmaking."

  I sigh. "What exactly are you hoping to accomplish tomorrow? Are you just trying to scare a few people? Or is there more to it than that?"

  "I'm not trying to scare anybody. I just want the folks who are reviewing your permit applications to understand that the people who live in this area are opposed to the expansion. They're opposed to draining a river, they're opposed to expanding a parking lot into wetlands, they're opposed to"

  "Reedy, relax," I say, cutting him off. "The extra parking spaces will be nowhere near the wetlands."

  "You want them east of the base lodge, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  He pauses. "I was told that your plans"

  "They're not my plans," I remind him.

  "The resort's plans," he says, correcting himself, "proposed adding two hundred and seventy-five parking spaces in the wetlands area east of the base lodge."

  "Look at the plans yourself, Reedy. Whoever briefed you screwed up. Yes, the parking spaces will be east of the base lodge, but they'll run parallel to the access road. They won't touch the wetlands. I promise."

  "You didn't change the plans?"

  "Oh for God's sake, of course we didn't!"

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  He looks at me, and I can see in his eyes that he is disgusted with himself for not reviewing the plans himself. He rubs his temples.

  Sensing his frustration, Patience finds an excuse to leave us. "I'll go see who called," she says, squeezing Reedy's shoulder as she passes by.

  I consider for a moment trying to be kind to Reedy, and telling him that he has a lot to do, and he can't be expected to read every land use permit that's submitted to the Agency of Natural Resources. But then I choose not to, deciding instead to allow Reedy to wriggle and twist for a moment.

  From the kitchen I hear the voice of either Gertrude or Jeanette Scutter on the answering machine, but I cannot quite make out what the woman is saying.

  "Hell, everything else that's pissing you off is true," I finally tell him, shrugging. My tone is soothing, but I know that my words will disturb him. "The resort really does plan on using the Chittenden to make snow. It really does plan on cutting down a couple of trees."

  Out the west window there is a thin strip of pink left in the sky, the last moments of daylight.

  "A couple," he says, his voice still depressed.

  "A couple," I wink. "A little fire wood."

  He allows himself a small groan, and then looks up when Patience returns from the kitchen. She stands in the doorway, her arms crossed before her chest, and looks concerned.

  "Who was it?" Reedy asks her.

  "Gertrude Scutter."

  "I should probably call her back right now," he says, standing. "I doubt I'll have time tomorrow."

  "Don't bother," my sister-in-law says. "She was looking for me."

  "Why?"

  After pushing her tongue into her cheek she says, "Poor things, their well went dry. Bone, desert, burnt-toast dry. So they want me to find them a new spring."

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  9

  Exactly why does dowsing work? I'm not exactly sure. I know only that it has never worked for me.

  Over the years, I have tried to dowse many times. Sometimes I have been alone, sometimes Laura and Miranda have been with me. It hasn't made a differenc
e. I have tried dowsing with brass L rods with copper sleeves, and with steel L rods with plastic sleeves. I have used my wife's L rods, hoping that somehow her "residual aura" would help me. I have toyed with the Y rod that hangs on a peg inside our pantry door, and I have spun Laura's quartz and crystal pendulums around my fingers for hours at a time, twirling the chains as if they were rosary beads.

  But, for me, dowsing has never succeeded. I have stood for what might have been hours at a time directly over our well and felt not the slightest tug in the Y rod. I have stood on top

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  of our septic tank, forced myself to see and smell and hear the fluids roiling below me, and felt absolutely nothing course through my fingers.

  "You're not concentrating," Laura told me.

  "You're not taking this seriously," Miranda said.

  Either reason may account for my continual failures. When I walk around with a Y-shaped stick in my hands, or a pair of coat hangers bent into L's, it is indeed difficult for me to take dowsing very seriously.

  When that Y rod or those L rods are in the hands of an experienced dowser such as my wife or my sister-in-law, however, then I am capable of taking dowsing completely seriously. Then I am able to believe that it works.

  But I still cannot explain it.

  I have heard all the explanations, some more rational than others. Few dowsers, after all, agree with Patience Avery that successful dowsing results from a link that a few specially chosen women have with the fluids surrounding them in nature.

  Many dowsersincluding most of those who believe that virtually anyone in this world can dowsecontend that dowsing is a physical process: When water flows underground, they say, it emits an impulse that causes an involuntary muscular contraction. That contraction, in turn, causes the rods to move.

  Others view dowsing as a natural instinct, an innate survival mechanism that exists in almost all animalsincluding humans. "Elephants in the middle of the desert will find water," a past president of the American Society of Dowsers once told a local newspaper.

  This, of course, doesn't begin to explain map dowsing, or the sort of witchery that makes dowsers such as Patience Avery very rich. Finding gold. Lost objects. Missing persons. It doesn't explain how Patience once found a downed pilot and his friend on Mount Ira Allen, or a lingerie bag with secret letters in a fraternity house at Amherst College. It doesn't

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  explain the obstacle course of oil rigs off the coast of Santa Barbara and in the dry soil south of Redding, Oklahomatestimony to my sister-in-law's prowess when she was in her twenties, and married to an executive with one of the larger oil companies.

  Consequently, some people insist that dowsing can only be explained by the presence of a sixth sense, by extrasensory perception. Some would say that this sixth sense is in many of us, and somesuch as my sister-in-lawwould say it is in only that small, select few.

  Personally, I could not begin to guess how many people in this world can actually dowse. But I do believe that whatever it is that gives them the power is stronger in some families than in others, and that lurking somewhere among the basic physical units of heredity, among the linear sequences of nucleotides that determine whether we'll have red or blond hair, whether our eyes will be green or blue or brown, whether we'll be poets or potters or lawyers for ski resorts, is an honest-to-God, carefully coded, RNA-ready dowsing gene.

  Men with beards and women in peasant skirts, little girls whose hair needs to be brushed, crowd the front steps of the Capital Building, clapping and chanting and singing andwhenever Reedy McClure opens his mouth from the top of the stepslistening with rapt attention. Almost as one, somewhere between six hundred and one thousand people move or stand still, sway back and forth or dance in one place. There is the smell of hot June sweat in the air, and the ground seems to move when Reedy stamps his feet and six hundred to one thousand pairs of sandals and work boots and sneakers stamp in response. Or respect. Or adulation.

  The Copper Project, this afternoon at least, is one unified, focused, unquestioning phalanx against development. It is a living buffer against change, a breathing stream of hate against Powder Peak.

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  And providing the single-minded animus is the voice of the man who will soon be my brother-in-law, echoing over loudspeakers, reverberating throughout Montpelier. Videotape cameras bob up and down before him, boom mikes hover around his face like butterflies, the sun bounces off the glass of his wrist watch whenever he raises his arm to the sky in disgust.

  "He's going to single us out," Ian Rawls murmurs to me. "He's going to single us out, and the whole mob is going to lynch us."

  We lean against parking meters across the street from the wide lawns of the Capital Building. "I wouldn't worry," I tell Ian. "Reedy promised me last night that he'd keep the melodrama down to a minimum."

  His voice is robust, but he has indeed toned down his melodrama. I have not once heard words like "rape" and "slaughter" and "crush." Nevertheless, I know that in spite of the measured tones of his delivery, his relatively even-handed choice of words, he is filling the heads of the tie-dyed, blue-jeaned, overalled crowd before him with an apocalyptic vision of treeless mountains and dead rivers, of bears and moose and deer that must move north to Quebec to survive.

  "I just don't understand what they expect to accomplish," Ian says. "Don't they have jobs they're supposed to be at?"

  There are still more people arriving, strolling, sauntering, skipping in the case of the children, into the back of the mass held in thrall by Reedy McClure. Some of them come merely to gawk, drawn to the scene as much by the presence of the cameras and lights as they are by the crowd itself; others were perhaps vaguely aware all along that there was some sort of rally today, and now gravitate to the mass with interest.

  And towering over them all is the dome of the state Capital Building, its gold leaf reflecting the searing afternoon sun. It is a luminescent beacon inviting the opponents of the Powder Peak Ski Resort to come together and protest, to come and gather and fight, to do all that they can to oppose a couple new ski trails on the side of a mountain.

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  "Does this sort of rally influence your thinking?" Roger Noonan's reporter asks Ian, while over her shoulder the crowd on the Capital lawn slowly disperses. Some of Reedy's apostles stand around to watch the senator forty yards behind us, as he is interviewed by the television stations.

  "It certainly does. The resort lives in this community," he says, answering with words he rehearsed with our firm, but delivering them in so clipped a fashion that he sounds almost angry.

  "Then how will you respond?"

  The reporter, a young woman with shoes too stylish for Montpelier, is new to Roger's newspaper and new to the area. She has introduced herself as Rosamond Donahue, and made it clear that she is neverevercalled Rosie. She has a slight southern accent, and will probably last about six months at the Sentinel before being stolen away by a better paper in a bigger city.